Dissident Voice

March
27, 2003

Barely
into its second week Operation Easy Sailing is in big trouble. One simple way
of measuring just how big is by adding up all the time you hear the phrases
“all according to Plan”, and the “Our strategy is sound”.

That’s
the captain of the Titanic speaking. At the military level the US/UK force has
been forced to suspend its advance on Baghdad. Every single dire prediction of
the critics is coming to pass. The stretched lines of communication and supply
running up west of the Euphrates past Nasiriya and Najaf, or further east ,
west of the Tigris past Basra towards Amarah are proving vulnerable to
determined harassment by Iraqi forces. The Apache helicopters have taken a
fearful beating, as have the Abrams tanks. The Shock and Awe overture saw
around 400 cruise missiles, running at half a million dollars a copy achieve
less than significant damage.

Already
there’s fierce hand-to-hand infighting inside the Pentagon, as Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld’s numerous enemies in the military seek out favored
journalist to inflict punitive retaliation for what they describe as his
arrogance and folly. Those old lines from the Vietnam era, such as “light at
the end of the tunnel”, “credibility gap” and the other scarred veterans are
back in active service.

Politically,
the damage is equally, if not more serious. The entire strategy of Bush and his
counselors, the relatively small military force, the “roll north” (or “roll
south” until the Turkish people, bolstered by the world peace movement decreed
otherwise) scenario, were premised on disintegration of the Saddam regime and
amiable surrender of all enemy forces once the first missiles fell on empty
palaces in Baghdad and tanks rolled across the Iraqi border towards Umm Qasr.

That
political strategy lies in ruins as instructive as the gravestones of the
British force caught and wiped out at Kut by the Turks almost a century ago.
From Umm Qasr through to Najaf towards Baghdad Iraqis are resisting fiercely.
The credibility of the Iraqi exiles, on call as figleaf leaders has dwindled to
zero. Back in the homelands of the US/UK invaders the peace movement proved its
durability, with huge demonstrations. Much of the world is revelling in
Imperial Reverses, and that in itself is an event of vast political
significance. The supposed news monopoly of the American Empire has similarly
collapsed. The European audience of subscribers to Al Jazeera surged by four
million in the first week.

Anyone
with a laptop can find their way to informed sources, such as the daily
bulletins of Russian military intelligence, or the knowledgeable commentary of
US veterans, that demolish the parrot babble of the Embedded Ones.

Even
the core Spokesfolk of Empire like the Washington Post are facing reality.
Here’s how the Washington Post addresses the political elites today, with a
report by Thomas Ricks:

“March 27 — Despite the rapid advance of
Army and Marine forces across Iraq over the past week, some senior U.S.
military officers are now convinced that the war is likely to last months and
will require considerably more combat power than is now on hand there and in
Kuwait, senior defense officials said yesterday.

“The combination of wretched weather,
long and insecure supply lines, and an enemy that has refused to be supine in
the face of American military might has led to a broad reassessment by some top
generals of U.S. military expectations and timelines. Some of them see even the
potential threat of a drawn-out fight that sucks in more and more U.S. forces.
Both on the battlefield in Iraq and in Pentagon conference rooms, military
commanders were talking yesterday about a longer, harder war than had been
expected just a week ago, the officials said.

“Tell me how this ends,” one senior
officer said yesterday. While some top planners favor continuing to press
north, most Army commanders believe that the pause in Army ground operations
that began yesterday is critical. A relatively small force is stretched thin
over 300 miles, and much of the Army’s killing power, in more than 100 AH-64
Apache attack helicopters, has been grounded by persistently foul weather or by
battle damage from an unsuccessful pre-dawn raid on Monday. To the east, the
Marine Corps advance on the city of Kut was also hampered by skirmishing along
its supply line and fuel shortages at the front.”

And
amid these reverses, the battle for hearts and minds inside Iraq is taking
familiar forms.

“U.S. Marines, moving through this
still-contested city, opened fire at anything that moved Tuesday, leaving
dozens of dead in their wake, at least some of them civilians. Helicopter
gunships circled overhead, unleashing Hellfire missiles into the squat
mud-brick homes and firing their machine guns, raining spent cartridge cases
into neighborhoods. Occasionally a tank blasted a hole in a house. Several
bodies fell in alleys. It was impossible to know which casualties were civilians
and which were members of the Iraqi militias that have ambushed Marine convoys
here for days as the Marines tried to cross the Euphrates River on a rapid
march north to Al Kut, where they are expected to engage elements of Iraq's
Republican Guard….”

We
are, remember, just past the anniversary of the My Lai massacre, March 16,
1968, when American Gis, part of Operation Phoenix, machine-gunned hundreds
upon hundreds of women and babies and old men in a trench in Vietnam, where US
forces tried to suppression resistance in an area far smaller than what they
propose to control in the Fertile Crescent today. Now roll fast forward to
today’s US excursion: “’I saw a lot of bloodshed,’ said Sgt. Ken Woechan, 23, a
reservist and assistant Wal-Mart manager from Ocean Springs. Miss. Woechan said
at Nasiriya he saw what he believed were militiamen hiding behind women and
children. ‘A family would run across and there would be a guy behind them,’ he
said.”

It
doesn’t take any imagination to see what’s going to unroll in the next days and
weeks, as the US/UK forces try to consolidate their lines through south and
central Iraq.

The
old Scorched Earth Strategy is already beginning to unfurl, as the talk of
Precision Attacks fades, and the B-52s slowly widen their attack patterns, and
“softening up” the Republican guard means bombing neighborhoods in Baghdad.
Three hundred miles south, the British are already committing war crimes by
cutting off the water supplies of Basra, an attack on a civilian population
that has not gone unnoticed back in London, where Tam Dalyell, Labor MP for
Linlithgow and Father of the House of Commons writes today in the Guardian of
Blair as a war criminal who should be sent for trial in the Hague.

“My constituency Labour party has just
voted to recommend that Tony Blair reconsider his position as party leader
because he gave British backing to a war against Iraq without clearly expressed
support from the UN .I agree with this motion. I also believe that since Mr
Blair is going ahead with his support for a US attack without unambiguous UN
authorisation, he should be branded as a war criminal and sent to The Hague. I
have served in the House of Commons as a Labour member for 41 years,and I would
never have dreamed of saying this about any one of my previous leaders. But
Blair is a man who has disdain for both the House of Commons and international
law. This is a grave thing to say about my leader. But it is far less serious
than the results of a war that could set western Christendom against Islam.The
overwhelming majority of international lawyers, including several who advise
the government (such as Rabinder Singh, a partner in Cherie Booth's Matrix
Chambers), have concluded that military action in Iraq without proper UN
security council authorisation is illegal under international law. The Foreign
Office's deputy legal adviser, Elizabeth Wilmhurst, resigned on precisely this
point after 30 years' service. This puts the prime minister and those who will
be fighting in his and President Bush's name in a vulnerable legal position.
Already lawyers are getting phone calls from anxious members of the armed
forces.”

One
final quote, from a Knight Ridder story describing the Pentagon in-fighting,
quoting an anonymous officer:” He added ruefully: ‘As in Operation Anaconda in
Afghanistan, we are using concepts and methods that are entirely unproved. If
your strategy and assumptions are flawed, there is nothing in the well to draw
from… If these guys fight and fight hard for Baghdad, with embedded Baathists stiffening
their resistance at the point of a gun, then we are up the creek,’ said one
retired general. Dr. John Collins, a retired Army colonel and former chief
researcher for the Library of Congress, said the worst scenario would be
sending American troops to fight for Baghdad. He said every military commander
since Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese strategist, has hated urban warfare.
"Military casualties normally soar on both sides; innocent civilians lose
lives and suffer severe privation; reconstruction costs skyrocket,"
Collins said, adding that fighting for the capital would cancel out the allied
advantages in air and armor and reduce it to an Infantry battle house to house,
street by street.”

It
all comes from political arrogance. Here’s a story from The Guardian last
August, re-run gleefully by LSN. “The biggest war game in US military history,
staged this month at a cost of 165m with 13,000 troops, was rigged to ensure
that the Americans beat their ‘Middle Eastern’ adversaries, according to one of
the main participants. General Paul Van Riper, a retired marine
lieutenant-general, told the Army Times that the sprawling three-week
millennium challenge exercises, were "almost entirely scripted to ensure a
[US] win".

And
Hitchens?

We
always have a little space for him. Here’s a story from the British Daily
Telegraph by Tony Harndon in Washington DC, March 20.

"Last
week, in a private and unpublicized lecture at the White House, Hitchens, a
former Trotskyite who has called for Henry Kissinger to be indicted as a war
criminal, addressed officials about the moral imperative to unseat Saddam
Hussein.”

Gee,
maybe soon we’ll be able to script The Trial of Christopher Hitchens. And
here’s a note of mine that the Washington Times just published.

From Alexander Cockburn

To Washington Times Letters editor

March 24, 2003

Sir, In their piece of March 21 about
Christopher Hitchens' transition to the right your reporters Galupo and
Wattenberg write that "Mr. Cockburn is publicly accusing his old friend of
homosexuality." This is entirely untrue. I did recently comment on
Hitchens' notorious enjoyment of alcohol, a taste on which he dwells at some
length in a recent column in Vanity Fair, saying (optimistically in the view of
many of his acquaintances) that it is his servant, not his master. Maybe in the
virtuous offices of the Washington Times the two tastes are regarded as
synonymous. In an effort to account for Hitchens' increasing seclusion in
fantasy I discussed Korsakoff's syndrome, a condition of advanced drinkers
where delusions attain paramountcy in the drinker's brain. Back in Clinton-time
when Hitchens tried to get his close friend Sid Blumenthal nailed by Congress
on a perjury rap I did allude in a column to Hitchens' habit of greeting
friends with a proffered kiss on cheek or even lips, but my allusion there was
to Judas Iscariot, not to Athenian practices.

Yours,

Alexander Cockburn

Alexander Cockburn is the author The
Golden Age is In Us (Verso, 1995) and 5 Days That Shook the World:
Seattle and Beyond (Verso, 2000) with Jeffrey St. Clair. Cockburn and St.
Clair are the editors ofCounterPunch,
the nation’s best political newsletter, where this article first appeared.